Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Also, because he loved the land despite its seared countenance, he and his family were guaranteed permanent access, if they chose to visit. Because that had meant so much to his father, dead these thirty-four years now, Oscar McCarron had made it a tradition to spend at least one night a week out in the open, reveling in the solitude under the vast desert skies on the land they had once owned.

  The palomino enjoyed the desolate landscape, and without encouragement from McCarron, broke into a trot that gradually gave way to an all-out gallop as the energetic horse stretched her muscles, leaping over low basalt outcroppings and pounding across the baked hardpan. McCarron had his favorite camping spot, and the palomino knew full well how to get there.

  They reached the bowl-shaped depression with daylight to spare. Hardy lichens spattered the black rocks, showing off their vitality with a display of bright colors. Gypsum sand filled the depression, as if a hot blizzard had cascaded across the desert. A sinkhole between the rocks cradled a small, pure pool from a spring that bubbled up, filtered clean through yards of fine sand.

  McCarron went first to the spring and took deep gulps of water, which was cool from being in shade all day long. He swallowed the sweet wetness, not wanting to waste the water in his canteens. The palomino nudged his shoulder, urging him to hurry. But McCarron took his time, enjoying the water before the palomino could slobber all over inside the spring. Then he let her drink her fill.

  He unsaddled the horse and tied her to a gnarled stump. He went out with his hatchet to chop up some of the dead mesquite brush and haul it back to his makeshift firepit. The fire would burn hot, crackling and popping into the night, filling the still air with a rich aromatic smoke.

  Taking his mail out of the saddlebag, he held the mysterious padded envelope for an extra second, then decided to let the curiosity tickle his belly a little more. Oscar McCarron got few surprises in his life these days.

  He rolled up the advertising flyers and junk mail and placed them under the chopped mesquite wood, then lit the fire with a single match, as he usually did. The twigs were so dry they practically ignited themselves.

  McCarron unrolled his blanket and thin sleeping bag, then got out the cooking utensils. Looking up into the sky, he watched a shower of stars spray across the deepening darkness, the swarms of bright lights twinkling with a diamond richness that city dwellers never saw in their light-polluted skies.

  As the resinous flames blazed bright and hot, McCarron finally sat back on his favorite rock, took the padded envelope, and tore it open. He dumped the contents into his callused palm.

  “What the hell?” he said, disappointed after his hours of anticipation.

  He found only a scrap of paper and a small glassine envelope filled with a powdery residue, some sort of greasy black ash that squished in his fingers as he pressed the envelope. A scrap of paper also fell out, displaying a message inked in precise razor-edged letters.

  “FOR YOUR PART IN THE PAST.”

  No signature, no date, no address.

  “What the hell?” he said again. “For my part in the past of what?”

  He cussed at the horse, as if the palomino might somehow be able to give him an answer. The only thing of significance Oscar McCarron could think of having done in his entire lifetime had been an accident, a coincidence of fate—having owned the land on which the Trinity Test had taken place.

  He did feel deeply proud of that part in his country’s history, helping to spark the beginning of a nuclear age that had ended World War II and prevented those bloodthirsty Japanese from conquering half the world. That single successful atomic test had, in effect, begun the Cold War, leading to the development of more powerful superweapons that had kept the Commies in check. Sure, Oscar McCarron had been proud of his part in all that…but it wasn’t as if he had actually done anything.

  What else could the mysterious message mean?

  “Some crazy nutcase,” he muttered. With a rude noise, he tossed the note and the package of ash into the crackling mesquite fire.

  He unbuckled his food pack and pulled out a can of chili, which he opened with a handheld can opener. He dumped it into a pot, which he hung from a tripod above the flames. He took out his special treasure, plastic zipper-lock bags of jalapeños and fresh-roasted Hatch green chilis, which he added to the mix to give the bland, commercialized recipe a little more bite.

  As the food simmered, he listened to the utter quiet, the absence of birds or bats or insects. Just the desert silence, an opaque stillness that allowed him to hear himself breathe, hear the pulse in his ears, hear his own thoughts without being disturbed by a chatter of background noises. He let his eyes fall closed as he inhaled deeply of the stinging spices in the sizzling chili.

  The palomino snorted and whinnied, breaking the silence.

  “Awww, shut up,” McCarron said, but the mare blew loudly through her nostrils again, stomping from side to side as if afraid of something. She tossed her head, sniffing and snorting.

  “What is it?” he asked, slowly rising to his feet on creaking old knees. The horse acted as if she had scented a cougar or a bear, but McCarron knew that was ridiculous. Nothing larger than a few lizards, rattlesnakes, and kangaroo rats could survive out here in the Jornada del Muerto Desert.

  Then he heard the voices, whispering, like a wind of words in a foreign language, a chant, drumbeats, building to a scream. The hissing white background noise reminded him of the harsh static he heard when his TV was turned up too loud and the videotape ran out.

  “What the hell is it?” he said. “What’s out there?”

  McCarron stood and went to his saddle to pull out his rifle. The wind picked up, and he felt a hot breeze against his leathery cheeks—much hotter than the desert night. A dust storm? Brush fire?

  The palomino thrashed back and forth, straining against the rope. Her eyes rolled, wild and white. The mare reared and then leaped sideways, crashing into the rough lava as if pinned to the walls of the shallow depression.

  “Easy, girl! Easy!” McCarron turned to see a smear of blood on the rock from where the horse had scraped her flanks raw. But he didn’t take the time to soothe his horse.

  He waved the rifle’s barrel back and forth into the buzzing, roaring night air. Somebody, or something, had to be out there.

  “If you think you’re gonna mess with me, you got another think coming!” he shouted. His eyes watered, stinging. He fired a shot into the air, a warning, but the crack of the rifle vanished in the rising, howling noise.

  The desert air seared his mouth like a blast from the hottest oven, parching his throat, burning his teeth. He backed away. The horse squealed in terror, a bizarre animal insanity that frightened the old man more than his own confused senses possibly could.

  Suddenly the night around McCarron exploded as the angry presence behind those voices, behind the whispers and screams and the sudden heat, surged into the depression, as if someone had dropped a miniature sun right into his lap.

  Oscar McCarron’s world filled with an intolerable burst of atomic fire.

  THIRTEEN

  Trinity Site, near Alamogordo, New Mexico

  Friday, 11:18 A.M.

  Scully took her shift driving south from Albuquerque across the flat, dry southern half of New Mexico. The air-conditioning in the rental Ford Taurus began to complain as she drove up a steep grade and then began the long descent into the deeper desert.

  Beside her in the passenger seat Mulder folded and unfolded his copy of the faxed Unusual Occurrence Report that DOE representative Rosabeth Carrera had given him early that morning.

  “Thought you might find this of interest, Agent Mulder,” the dark-haired woman had said, pointing to the brief description that had come to her office on a standard distribution list from the Department of Energy headquarters. “The DOE requires that certain people be notified of unusual accidents relating to radiation. I’m one of those people—and this incident certainly qualifies.”

  Scully
had taken the sheet from her partner, scanning the description of yet another mysteriously burned body, presumably washed by a flood of radioactive fire. This one had occurred far from the Teller Nuclear Research Facility, out in the White Sands Missile Range, near a barren memorial that Scully knew of all too well—the Trinity Site, the location of the first test of an atomic explosion back in July 1945.

  “But how can this incident be relevant to Dr. Gregory’s death?” Scully had asked. “The victim was an old rancher, with no connection to current nuclear weapons research.”

  Rosabeth Carrera simply shrugged. “Look at the details. How could it not be related? These sorts of deaths don’t occur every day.”

  Mulder had eagerly taken back the Unusual Occurrence Report, rereading the summary. “I want to check it out, Scully. This could be the lead we’ve been looking for. Two clues instead of one.”

  Scully sighed and agreed. “The very fact that they seem so unrelated could be the break we need…once we figure it out.”

  And so they had raced to the Oakland airport, hopped a Delta flight to Salt Lake City, and then down to Albuquerque, where they had rented a car for the long drive south.

  Scully kept the car at ten miles over the speed limit, but the traffic still roared by in the fast lane. She gripped the steering wheel more tightly as a large three-trailered semi truck exploded past.

  Scully ran ideas by her partner as she drove. “Mulder, so far our working theory is that a weapons test went wrong in Dr. Gregory’s lab, or possibly that a protester engaged in some sabotage that led to his death. I don’t see how any of that fits with a dead rancher out on a deserted missile range.”

  Mulder folded the Unusual Occurrence Report and stuck it in the pocket of his jacket. “Maybe we’re not thinking big enough, Scully. Maybe there’s a broader connection, an overall relationship to nuclear weapons. Missile range…nuclear research lab…”

  “You may as well include the whole government, Mulder,” she said.

  “At least it gives us plenty of room to maneuver,” he said.

  After a brief moment of silence, Mulder narrowed his eyes and looked at Scully. “We’ll know more when we get there, I hope. I made a call back to Headquarters while we were at the airport. I’m expecting the people at White Sands to have some information faxed to them, a broader ID check on Oscar McCarron. We’ll see just how disconnected he is from Dr. Gregory. It might be something really obvious.”

  Scully returned her attention to the road unreeling ahead of her. “All right, we’ll see.”

  They decided to table further discussion until they actually arrived at the site where the old rancher’s burned body had been found.

  Mulder fidgeted, trying to avoid the heat that baked through the windows. “Next time let’s find out if the car has black seats before we sign the rental papers,” he suggested.

  “I agree.” As Scully drove, letting the speedometer top seventy-five, then eighty, she recalled that New Mexico with its desert highways had traditionally been the first state in the country to raise its speed limits, to the cheering of the state’s residents.

  They passed signs on the highway that read, “NOTICE! DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS. PRISON FACILITIES NEARBY.”

  “Charming place,” said Mulder.

  The Ford Taurus reached a small town past Socorro, called San Antonio, where they turned east, heading deeper into the Jornada del Muerto—the aptly named “Journey of Death” desert. At Stallion Gate, the northern entrance to the White Sands Missile Range, they stopped at a guard checkpoint and flashed their papers. A military escort came out to meet them, and then waved them through onto the bleak missile test site.

  Scully shaded her eyes and looked at the uninviting landscape—like the corpse of a once fertile land. She had seen the place in photos, but had never made it down to visit.

  “These gates are opened once a year,” she said, “so that tourists and pilgrims can go out to the actual Trinity Site and see what’s left of the McDonald Ranch. That’s ten miles deeper into the missile range, if I remember correctly. Not much to see, just a cairn of stones and a commemorative plaque.”

  “Just what I want to do on my summer vacation,” Mulder said. “Go out and stand right on Ground Zero.”

  Scully kept her silence. She didn’t think her partner knew about her peripheral involvement in protest activities in the past, and she preferred to keep that bit of her life private. It made her uncomfortable, though. She had always shared so much with Mulder. This uneasiness felt foreign to her, and she tried to identify her feelings. Embarrassment? she wondered. Or guilt? She drew a deep breath. They had a job to do here.

  Two military policemen pulled up in a Jeep. Scully and Mulder reluctantly left the air-conditioning of their Taurus and climbed down to meet the MPs. Neither of them was dressed properly for driving across the dusty gypsum sands, but the MPs didn’t seem to notice. They motioned for the two FBI agents to join them. Mulder secured their briefcases under the seat, then helped Scully climb into the back of the vehicle.

  The two of them sat on hot seats in the jouncing vehicle, holding on for dear life as the Jeep roared across the rutted flatlands, oblivious to the lack of any road. The MPs tightened their helmets and gritted their teeth against the flying dust.

  They arrived at a bowl-shaped depression where a dozen other MPs and Air Force officers stood at a cordoned-off site. Someone wearing anticontamination clothes and carrying a handheld Geiger counter had stepped deeper into the blockaded area, inspecting the site.

  Scully got out, ignoring the pain in her stiff legs. She felt dread build within her. Mulder walked silently beside her as they came to the edge of a depression bordered by dark volcanic rock.

  It looked as if the entire hollow had been melted.

  She and Mulder introduced themselves. A colonel waiting there had expected them. He handed Mulder a drooping sheet of thermal fax paper. “This came from your Bureau Headquarters, Agent Mulder,” he said, “but I could have told you that information. We know all about old Oscar. That’s how we found him there.”

  “So tell me,” Mulder said, raising his eyebrows hopefully. “We need every detail you can give us.”

  “That rancher is an old fart who’s come out here practically every week since before the Red Sea parted. He and his father originally owned the ranch land around here that was deeded to the Trinity Site—for the test, you know—but because of some wartime secrecy act, the names were changed on the paperwork so it couldn’t be discovered who had originally owned the land. I guess they were afraid of crazy protesters even back then, or maybe Nazi spies.” The colonel nodded down toward the blasted bowl. “And maybe they had good cause, considering what’s happened.”

  Scully couldn’t tear her eyes from the scene. The gypsum sand had been roasted by such extreme heat that it had become like a pottery glaze, turning into hardened glass with a greenish, jadelike consistency.

  “Trinitite,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Mulder asked.

  She nodded toward the glassy fusion that lined the sands. “I’ll bet we’ll find out that glassy sand and rock is Trinitite. Around Ground Zero during the Trinity Test the heat was intense enough to fuse the surrounding sand into a glasslike solid. Very unusual. People even collected the stuff.”

  “Come on, we can go closer,” the colonel said. “You’ll want to take a look if you’re to get any information from this.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Colonel,” Scully said.

  The gaunt, sunburned man turned to her. “We sure don’t want to have to solve this one, Agent Scully. You’re welcome to it.”

  She followed the colonel past the cordon, and down toward the flash-burned sands. Against one rock wall they could see the sprawling bowl glittering in the sunlight where the gypsum had turned molten.

  Fused into the ground by the intense heat were the blackened remains of two burned figures, a nearly disintegrated man, and a horse, flattened and incine
rated, pushed into the melted sands. The hardened glass had frozen the corpses into an eerie tableau, like tortured insects in amber.

  Mulder shuddered and turned away from the crisped horror of the victim’s face. He grasped Scully’s arm briefly for support. “I really hate fire,” he muttered.

  “I know, Mulder,” she said. She didn’t tell him how much she herself hated the threat of radiation and fallout. “I don’t think we should stay here any longer than we have to.”

  As she turned away, all she could think of were the hideously burned corpses, the photographs of Nagasaki victims at the Stop Nuclear Madness! museum in Berkeley.

  How could it be happening again, here?

  FOURTEEN

  Historic Owl Cafe, San Antonio, New Mexico

  Friday, 1:28 P.M.

  Before reaching the interstate on their trip back to Albuquerque, Scully and Mulder decided to stop at the “Historic” Owl Cafe, a rusty-tan adobe building that looked like an abandoned movie set. The large building seemed the only thing of note in the entire city of San Antonio, New Mexico. The gravel parking lot hosted four battered and dirty pickup trucks, two Harley-Davidsons parked side by side, and an old-model Ford station wagon.

  “Let’s risk it, Scully,” Mulder said. “We’ve got to grab lunch anyway. It’s a long drive north.”

  Scully folded the highway map and climbed out of the car into the sweltering heat. She shaded her eyes. “I wish at least one other city in this state had a major airport,” she said. She followed Mulder to a big glass door encrusted with road dust. He held it open for her, and she noted from the sticker on the glass that the restaurant was AAA approved.